Melanie Bush
Melanie Jane "Mel" Bush, BSc (Hons) was a computer programmer and companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors. She hailed from Pease Pottage, West Sussex, at the turn of the 21st century. (PROSE: Business Unusual; AUDIO: Catch-1782, The One Doctor, The Juggernauts) Although she was present for the Doctor's sixth regeneration, she did not witness it, as she was unconscious at the time after being exposed to a latent radiation which only knocked her out, but was fatal to Time Lords. As a result, the presence of a new incarnation of the Doctor confused her and made it hard to adjust to the differences in his appearance and personality. She had a temporally complex relationship with the Doctor. She met the Doctor in an order different than he met her, as Charley Pollard and River Song later would. Eventually, however, their timelines synchronised, and she had a more-or-less linear relationship to the Doctor, starting in the later period of his sixth incarnation. Her temporal relationship to the Seventh Doctor was considerably more straightforward and linear. Because Mel's timeline was confused with respect to the Doctor, it was difficult to state with authority the order in which events happened to her. Melanie Bush was born to Alan and Christine Bush on 22 July 1964. She had an older sister named Anabel, whose death she accidentally caused when Anabel was three years old. Mel's original home was at 8 Gosling Street in Croxdale. After her sister Anabel's death, her parents moved south to separate themselves from the tragedy. (PROSE: Spiral Scratch) As a child, Mel took dancing lessons from a woman named Miss Fairs. She enjoyed the music of ABBA and the Bee Gees. (PROSE: Business Unusual) At the age of eight, Mel committed the names of 150 different species of dinosaur to memory. (AUDIO: The Wrong Doctors) Mel had read the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes by the age of nine. (AUDIO: Unregenerate!) She and her parents once walked through deep snow to their village hall whilst carrying all the props and costumes for a show for pensioners. (AUDIO: The One Doctor) While at primary school, she made a replica of Mount Vesuvius out of papier mâché. She would later witness its eruption on 24 August 79 and the consequent destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii. (AUDIO: The Fires of Vulcan) Melanie had a keen interest in science from a very young age. Her uncle, Dr John Hallam, was deeply influential to this childhood obsession, and she credited him with her later academic success at a London university. In 2003, Hallam told his colleague, Professor David Munro, that Mel was "very gifted" with computers. (AUDIO: Catch-1782) As a consequence of her education, she was adept in the human computer languages of BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN. (AUDIO: The Juggernauts) At the time of her initial encounter with the Sixth Doctor, she was working at a summer job with Brighton Information Technologies, a prerequisite for a full-time job with ACL Services, Ltd. Her home address as an adult was 36 Downview Crescent in Pease Pottage. (PROSE: Business Unusual) She regularly used this address as a backdoor when writing code. For instance, she used it to override programming on the Juggernauts. (AUDIO: The Juggernauts)